1. See the Cotton Nero A.x. project (http://www.ucalgary.ca/~scriptor/cotton/, accessed April 25, 2008), which will eventually provide digital photographs, transcriptions, and editions of all the poems in the manuscript.
2. Gabrielle M. Spiegel, “History, Historicism, and the Social Logic of the Text in the Middle Ages,” Speculum 65.1 (1990): 84 [59–86].
3. For views on the relationship between Saint Erkenwald and the other poems, see, for instance, Larry D. Benson, “The Authorship of Saint Erkenwald,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 64 (1965): 393–405.
4. For speculation on the identities of both the poet and the maiden, see Oscar Cargill and Margaret Schlauch, “The Pearl and Its Jeweller,” PMLA 43 (1928): 105–23. More recently, Lynn Staley has speculated about Thomas of Woodstock’s possible role as a patron of this poet. Staley, “Pearl and the Contingencies of Love and Piety,” in Medieval Literature and Historical Inquiry: Essays in Honour of Derek Pearsall, ed. David Aers (Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 2000), pp. 83–114.
5. Paul F. Reichardt, “‘Several Illuminations, Coarsely Executed’: The Illustrations of the Pearl Manuscript,” Studies in Iconography 18 (1997): 130 [119–42].